WRT: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/50497
Dear Mr Fatah,
Somalia is a country that has very old links to India and the
families of the late Siad Barre and Muhammad Farah Aideed have as
many Indian relatives as they do Somali ones. My family knew
President Barre's family quite well and I was a particularly close
friend of his nephew Shakel Abdul until I left India to move to the
USA a little more than five years ago. The fact is that while the
Barre government was not, quite, the best possible government that
Somalia had, it took great care to keep the religious fundamentalists
on a leash. It was when Muhammad Farah Aideed was the Somali
Ambassador to India that he was tempted into planning his ultimately
successful coup against Barre by a combination of American and Saudi
funds and support leading to the mess that Somalia later became. In
the end, Aideed ended up fighting the Americans like their allies in
Afghanistan at that time, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and others, are doing now though the US managed to make its peace with Aideed when his son Hassan joined the US armed forces and became an officer. That said, Aideed's assassination once again threw Somalia into complete turmoil, making it a sanctuary for the number of murderous fundamentalist groups that it has become today.
I still recall the many arguments that Shakel and I had in the
evenings at Elliot's Beach in Madras before he broke his legs in a
severe automobile accident and moved to Hyderabad where he lives with his charming Indian hotelier wife today where we talked about his country. On one occasion we met Ambassador (often incorrectly referred to as "General" in the US media) Aideed as well and my recollection of him is that he was an extremely quiet man and a patient listener, not the raving fundamentalist that the media here would have people believe. When I last spoke to Shakel on his daughter's birthday two weeks before I left India, our final discussion, as always was about politics. We talked about the growing fundamentalist takeover of his country while I took his mother and brothers' contact details (they live in Canada) and his parting words were, "My family didn't do everything right but we did keep the mad dogs on a leash. Aideed did the same. When the Americans attacked him, they made sure that the mad dogs would rule one day." The horrific murder of this little girl only proves how true his words were.
I have hypothesized for a long time that the US and the West backed
fundamentalist regimes through the Cold War years in order to ight
left of center governments around the world. That was what happened
in Afghanistan and in Somalia in addition to countless other trouble-
spots around the world. When the mujahiddeen took Kabul, one of the
first public acts that they performed was to grab a girl who was
wearing a skirt and hack off her legs where they were visible,
leaving her to bleed to death in public. This was widely reported in
the Asian media, but the American media didn't care - to them there
was a victory to be celebrated over the Soviet "Evil Empire's" ashes
at the time, it hardly mattering that what was to come would
eventually lead to a savage attack on the USA itself on 9/11. In the
end, the victory of fundamentalist forces over these extremely
marginalized countries was nothing more than a result of global
politics, especially that of the USA and the Soviet Union as
ideological opponents.
Sorry to go off on a rant but your post brought back a number of old
memories that I shall, shortly, write about in an article after
contacting my old friend in Hyderabad. Thank you very much for your
hard work in highlighting the abuses of individual freedoms under
religious fundamentalism.
Mehul Kamdar
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